ABSTRACT
This chapter is divided according to lay categories of explanation: who, what, when, where, why. These are covered in three sections – one long, two short. The first section presents a scientific ontology divided into a meronomy of state groupings and a meronomy of person groupings. It covers the who and the why. This sub-section can be characterized, then, as a “constitutive theory”. The second section briefly covers the location of cooperation and goes into the details of liaisons, geopolitics, and jurisdictions. In other words, it presents a spatial ontology of cooperation. Similarly, the third section briefly examines the –when” of inter-state security cooperation, not in the sense of history or process tracing but rather as a temporal ontology of cooperation. Inasmuch, the second and third sections seek to place inter-state security cooperation in space and time. The result is a critical historical ontology of inter-state cooperation, to be elaborated and expanded through the subsequent chapters and future empirical research and theorization.
